Judaism as an evolving religious civilization

Reconstructionist Jews affirm, in the phrase of the movement's founder Mordecai Kaplan, that Judaism is an evolving religious civilization, not only a religion but the whole culture of a people: its language, art, folkways, ethics, and history as well as its faith. On this view Judaism is the creation of the Jewish people rather than something imposed on it from outside, and it has always changed as the people's life has changed. The task of each generation is to reconstruct the civilization so that it continues to give meaning under new conditions. Kaplan set out the theory in his 1934 book Judaism as a Civilization, and put it into liturgical practice in the 1945 Reconstructionist prayer book, which revised or omitted traditional passages he judged inconsistent with a naturalist and non-chosen-people theology, including references to Jews as divinely chosen and to a personal messiah.

The Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada responded that same year by publicly burning a copy of the prayer book at a New York hotel and issuing a writ of excommunication (cherem) against Kaplan, an extraordinary reaction that illustrates how far Reconstructionism's redefinition of Judaism as a human, evolving civilization rather than a divinely revealed religion was seen to depart from classical belief.

This affirmation reframes the traditional relationship: where classical Judaism sees the people as constituted by a covenant given from God, Reconstructionism sees the tradition as arising from the people's own evolving experience. It makes community and peoplehood central and treats law as folkway, binding by the weight of communal life rather than by divine command. The belief is the organising idea of the smallest of the major American Jewish movements and is closely tied to its distinctive, naturalist understanding of God.

The movement institutionalised with the founding of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College near Philadelphia in 1968. Reflecting its view of Judaism as a human, evolving civilization responsive to its people's changing life, Reconstructionism became the first major American Jewish movement to ordain openly gay and lesbian rabbis, in 1984, well ahead of the Reform movement's parallel decision in 1990 and the Conservative movement's in 2006, a sequence that illustrates how the different denominations' theological starting points, Reconstructionist peoplehood, Reform autonomy, and Conservative halakha, have translated into different paces of change on the same practical questions.